If you don't get Facebook and Twitter

Read this NYTimes article; it lives up to its excellent reputation

The NY Times is often considered the US newspaper of record, and it lives up to its reputation with an excellent article in today’s Sunday NY Times Magazine about the ambient awareness enabled by Facebook status updates, Twitter and other microblogging tools.

Even readers familiar with both popular microblogging tools and their history should read this article. High points:

In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted
constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet
when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it
intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online
contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much
like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through
the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out
of the corner of your eye.

Ambient awareness comes not from any single tweet or status update, but from the aggregation of the data.

Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the
rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one
friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter
updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned
the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at
work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of
sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he
grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each
individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own,
even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little
snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your
friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a
pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the
real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the
sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type
of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension
floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to
say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my
friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” … And when
they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never
actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up
to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing
something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if
picking up a conversation in the middle.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo
and former professor of information science at the University of
California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the
single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting
with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting
here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and
you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also
why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve
experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed
isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day,
though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a
month, and it’s a novel.

Ambient awareness helps maintain “weak ties”. Sociological research
has shown that a large network of weak ties is more likely to be
helpful than a small network of strong ties when trying to do things
like get a job, find a mate, and other socially tinged objectives

Many maintained that their circle of true intimates,
their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant
online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t
actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still
predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day
for that.

But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak
ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be
someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who
recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s
holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of
acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when
one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your
feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist.

Microblogging, ambient awareness and maintaining weak ties has the
sideeffect of making it impossible to move away and “reinvent yourself”
as your past will always be with you.

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It
brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your
business…

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie
because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current
generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their
friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If
you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life,
going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the
20th century.”…

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You
can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on
you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl
Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and
you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On
the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today,
everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a
dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”